[xupybd]

The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible.

The actual alt-right political movement is just a very small group. I don't think many outside of that small group actually hold the racist and misogynistic views that are expressed on these forums. It's often just backlash at the rapid change in culture. People want to break the new rules of discourse.

The bigger problem is genuine right wing views then get lumped in with the alt-right. Speakers like Ben Shapiro get called alt-right when their views are not racist or misogynistic. Before long people view many right wing views as hate speech. The more they do that the more people react by saying actually hateful things as a backlash. And so the divide grows.

[ryanlol]

>The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible.

After watching and participating in this for years, I don't think this is true anymore.

The people who found it funny to piss off people by pretending to be Nazis ended up attracting actual Nazis and were eventually replaced by them.

It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half the country actually agrees with you.

[viridian]

>It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half the country actually agrees with you.

Half the country are white supremacists? I think you should walk outside and interact with some actual human beings.

[ryanlol]

I haven’t been in the US for many years but would certainly expect to arrive at a different opinion when talking to actual people, however that is not the opinion that the elections reflect.

Either half the population are white supremacists or they’re simply too stupid to not vote for white supremacists, which isn’t any better than actually being one. It’s not like all the people who supported Hitler literally wanted to kill millions of jews, still they supported it.

[xupybd]

I think you’d have a hard time proving Trump is a white supremacists. I’m also sure most of his supporters are not either. This is the problem we keep demonising the other side. Instead we should endeavour to understand them. You don’t convince people to agree with your ideas by calling them evil.

[tdb7893]

I can respect that view but I don't personally view that as the bigger problem. I think that the amount of liberals who think that genuine right wing political views are alt-right is also a very small group. Also I'm not sure they are always just trolling, to use r/the_Donald as an example again it's one of the larger subreddits and it frequently has Islamophobic comments upvoted (and somewhat less often there will be racist or misogynistic comments, too) that aren't jokes and there is no one there to troll. I know it's a backlash against recent spcietal changes and hopefully it will eventually die down but the fact that there are some reasonably sized communities online which have normalized hate speech is really worrying to me. Even the highest tiers of the US political system have shown themselves receptive to those hateful messages so it's hard to see it as just a minor problem.